A motor vehicle headlight of the general type to which this invention relates is known from the U.S. Pat. No. 3,808,422, in particular its FIG. 4. The known headlight described there includes a parabolic mirror having a light source located substantially at the focus and an interference type polarizer which intercepts the light emitted by the parabolic mirror and divides it into two transverse polarized beams which are then reflected by plane mirrors and emitted by the headlight in the direction of the optical axis. In the known headlight, all of the light emitted is polarized and serves as both high and low beam. There is no provision for any unpolarized emitted light. In any transition from the use of unpolarized light sources such as are common today to a glare-free polarized lighting system of the future, it must be expected that transitional difficulties will occur. For example, generally speaking, loss-free headlights emitting polarized light tend to be larger and thus are not readily exchangeable for the headlights in use today. Furthermore, at least during the transition period, it will have to be possible to switch from low to high beams even with polarized light. However, in the low beam mode, it is virtually impossible to see polarized headlights on vehicles traveling in the opposite direction. Furthermore, it has been found that when polarized light of the same intensity as unpolarized is used to illuminate the near field, the field illuminated by unpolarized light appears to be less bright. This phenomenon appears to be due to the non-uniform depolarization of the light returned to the eye of the driver from the near and far fields, respectively.